Overnight Briefing & General Reality Check - Mar 11, 2021

You've probably heard about the upcoming BEE GEES biopic about the life and times of the group. The script is still being written, but Variety reports KENNETH BRANAGH has been picked to direct the film, which is being produced by STEVEN SPIELBERG’s Amblin Entertainment along with “Bohemian Rhapsody” producer GRAHAM KING.

TV news: It'll be NATALIE PORTMAN and LUPITA NYONG’O starring in a Apple's upcoming series based on “Lady in the Lake.”

Did you go to a movie theatre in the last year? No? That's a small part of the reason that AMC Entertainment reported a net loss of $4.6 billion-with-a-"b" dollars yesterday for the year 2020. Ouch!

Pushing up daisies: LOU OTTENS, the guy who invented the CD and cassette tapes. Lou died at his home in the Netherlands earlier this month. He was 94. Back in 1960, while working for the electronics company Royal Philips he and his team created the world’s first portable tape recorder. He later followed it up by inventing the cassette tape, which allowed everybody to deep-six their big reel-to-reels and pick up a compact cassette machine. Then, in the 1970s, Ottens helped co-create the first CD as well.

If you were among the folks who wanted to pick up the Parler social media app but were blocked after Apple's App Store dropped them after the Capitol riot --some bad news: you still won't be getting the app. Apple's App Store has reportedly denied them again, and the folks at Parler have dumped the seven programmers who were working on a new app that conformed to Apple's requirements. However, the Parler website relaunched in February with support from cloud hosting company, SkySilk Inc.

COVID #1: New stats reported in the New York Post claim that one in four adults in the US have gotten their first vaccine dose. Since there's 326.7 million people in the US, that would mean 81.6 million have received at least one dose.

COVID #2: Meanwhile, CNN reports the Smithsonian National Museum of American History has gotten the vial from the first authorized Covid-19 vaccine administered in the US, and will be displaying it in the museum. The Museum has also acquired vials from other Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, along with syringes, and other vaccination items.